What are your experiences of a property that states a “guide price”?
As a bit of background to the question, our house will be on the market tomorrow with an asking price of 279k. When deciding on asking price we had 3 agents round who all gave very similar valuations - put it on for up to 295k if we don’t mind hanging around for a bit and we’d probably get there, or if we wanted to move quicker, go from something a bit lower. We’d already decided we’d be happy with anything over 270k, so 279k seemed to be a good starting point and we’ve gone with that. However, one of the agents said to us that we should list it for a guide price of 260k – 280k to drum up business then refuse any offers less than 270k. His reasoning being that this would spark a bidding war and we’d get a much higher offer. This seemed a bit convoluted (to put it nicely) to us so we went with the more straight forward, asking price approach.
The reason I ask is because the house that we are interested in has a guide price of 475k and it feels very cheap at that price. It may still come to nothing as we’re not viewing until Thursday but assuming we did like it, what are your experiences of a “guide price” (is it always as I’ve outlined above where agents think they can start a bidding war?) and how would you approach making an offer? In case its relevant, our max budget is 520k and we don’t yet have an offer on our house (which I’m aware might well put us straight out of the running whatever offer we made but equally we might get an offer on ours quickly, things tend to move well where we are – who knows).
Thanks